Many for profit hospice companies are ripping us as taxpayers off by convincing doctors and nursing homes to put elderly into hospice care even though they don’t meet the requirement that they have only six months left to live.
“Hospice care, once chiefly a charitable cause, has become a growth industry, with $14 billion in revenues, 1,800 for-profit providers and a base of Medicare-covered patients that doubled to 1.1 million from 2000 to 2009. Compensation based on enrollment numbers, pay to nursing- home doctors who double as hospice medical directors, and gifts to the nursing facilities have helped fuel the boom, according to an examination of 1,000 pages of court documents and interviews with more than 45 current and former hospice employees, patients and family members,” reports the latest in a series of investigations by Bloomberg News.
“The inspector general of the U.S. Health and Human Services Department is probing hospice marketing practices and financial relationships with nursing facilities. The inquiry was spawned by a 2009 report by the Medpac commission, a congressional advisory body, that found hospices “aggressively marketed” to nursing-home patients, and paid incentives to medical directors for “inappropriate” referrals and enrollments,” writes reporter Peter Waldman.
“VistaCare Hospice, a unit of Atlanta-based Gentiva, paid enrollment bonuses to doctors, admissions directors and branch managers, according to Misty Wall, a former social worker for the company and now an assistant professor at Boise State University in Idaho. VistaCare also gave pizza parties, gift cards and other extras to its registered nurses and social workers for meeting admission targets, Wall said. Wall has filed a lawsuit against VistaCare in U.S. District Court in Dallas under the U.S. False Claims Act, seeking repayment to the government for admissions of ineligible hospice patients. The law lets plaintiffs share in any recoveries. The Justice Department, which has not joined Wall’s suit, is opposing VistaCare’s motion to dismiss the claim.”
Why aren’t more people upset by this? Making profits off of dieing people?! Just when you think our society can’t sink any lower. Why even put people with a terminal illness in the picture? Let’s just get together as taxpayers and give each of these corporations some of our money? At least it would take the sad fact that it is taking a good thing, such as hospice, and using it as a front to steal from United States taxpayers. This needs to stop!
My mothers nursing home Fox Ridge Developement suggested to my sister that we sign her up for Vista Care Hospice . They presented thier organization as a free service. We signed her up in August 2011.They gave her a bath 2-3 times a week and covered her meds that were directly related to her alziemers.In March my sister noticed that they were billing Medicare over $4,000.00 per month we immediatly discontinued the service ,we felt it was a medicare fraud, we already pay the nursing home almost $5,000.00 per month to take care of her.The nursing home is now billing us $2,000.00 for Vista Care Hospice. I need to know how to file a complaint with Medicare or will they even do anything .If anyone has any information on this please respond.